SGVCUE’s first Coffee Break of 2018 featured Matt Vaudrey (@mrvaudrey) and the use of music cues in the classroom. The main drive of using music cues is to transfer the locus of control from the teacher to the students. The bonus is that teachers are able to use less of their voices for counting down, calling for attention, and asking students to line up, etc.
We were able to experience it at the very beginning when Matt used music cues for directed small group conversations. We discussed the number of seconds we used to complete normal tasks throughout the school day (take out scissors, turn to page __, glue this in your notebook, etc.) and made the realization that we could save a whopping 76.95 hours of instructional time over the course of the school year. That’s some precious instructional time; five minutes for more questions, another 7 minutes for a mini lesson, etc.
Matt shared useful resources:
- bit.ly/cueslist – this sheet helps organize the habitual tasks in class
- bit.ly/musiccues2 – this gives access to Matt’s folder in Google Drive for more music cues – save it to your drive
- www.mrvaudrey.com/music – an exhaustive how-to for all your music cues questions!
- www.televisiontunes.com – SO MANY song choices!
Lastly, he demonstrated how to download/cut/fade the songs.
- Create a folder in Google Drive and name it accordingly (ie. Music Cues)
- Drag and drop all the songs that have been downloaded into the folder
- Go to www.mp3cut.net and upload the song directly from Drive
- Trim, edit, fade in/out the song as desired
- Save directly to Drive
To be a little fancy and combine two (or more) songs together, mp3cut.net’s tab “audio joiner” will allow that, too!
It was a fantastic learning experience and everyone found the hands-on session to be extremely useful. Thank you, Mr. Vaudrey!
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